2007 — 19 Mar: Happy birthday, favorite son and favorite cousin!
Junior is now 27, heh? My, how time1 flies. Why, it seems like only yesterday I was working upstairs on a freelance training package for the bit of ICL I'd just left when Christa came in with some supper, waited until I'd eaten it, and then suggested that, as her contractions were pretty regular maybe we should head for the hospital. Fifteen minutes after we got there, out you popped, and my life has never been the same since...
As for favorite cousin Leigh, she keeps catching me up but I'm fated to remain just that bit older. Hope you like the cards, the pair of you.
Mobile phone refuseniks unite!
Britain (it is asserted on the Interweb thingy) has more mobile phones than people. Of course, whether they have ever caught up with all those Poll Tax dodgers who went, as it were, "off the grid" back in those halycon Thatcher days is another question. Still, today's Guardian informs me I seem to be in good company in the UK as a Mobile Luddite. They say 4% of 25-to-44-year-olds (they do like their hyphens, don't they?) still don't have one...
Not even a high-pressure career is enough to convince some handset holdouts to sign up. "I don't need a mobile phone," says Treasury analyst Hazel Parker. "I feel I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I couldn't train staff to act in my absence. I can think of only one emergency where I wished I had one. I was up a mountain2 one day, and Radiohead tickets went on sale."
"If you're not on someone's Sim card, you might as well not exist." Now there's a thought! I find it a comfort to know that I have been written off as a lost cause.
Shaken, not stirred department
When a chap loads his new James Bond DVD into his almost as new Helios DVD player, the last thing he really wants to have to do at that point (instead, that is, of settling down to a couple of hours of mindless mayhem) is dismantle the bloody player before he can even take out the DVD and then plop it into one of the earlier Pioneer machines, which will play the damned thing without demur. Investigations will continue after the film, but so far I have got 18 of the 19 self-tapping screws I will need to put Helios Dumpty back together again.
